2,865 research outputs found
Organisational and occupational risk factors associated with work related injuries among public hospital employees in Costa Rica
Aims: To explore the relation between occupational and organisational factors and work related injuries (WRI) among public hospital employees in Costa Rica.Methods: A cross-sectional survey was conducted among a stratified random sample of 1000 employees from 10 of the 29 public hospitals in Costa Rica. A previously validated, self-administered questionnaire which included occupational and organisational factors and sociodemographic variables was used. From the final eligible sample ( n = 859), a total of 842 ( response rate 98%) questionnaires were returned; 475 workers were analysed after excluding not-at-risk workers and incomplete questionnaires. WRI were computed for the past six months.Results: Workers exposed to chemicals (RR = 1.36) and physical hazards ( RR = 1.26) had higher WRI rate ratios than non-exposed workers. Employees reporting job tasks that interfered with safety practices ( RR = 1.46), and a lack of safety training ( RR = 1.41) had higher WRI rate ratios than their counterparts. Low levels of safety climate ( RR = 1.51) and safety practices ( RR = 1.27) were individually associated with an increased risk of WRI. Also, when evaluated jointly, low levels of both safety climate and safety practices showed the highest association with WRI ( RR = 1.92).Conclusions: When evaluated independently, most of the occupational exposures and organisational factors investigated were significantly correlated with an increased injury risk. As expected, some of these associations disappeared when evaluated jointly. Exposure to chemical and physical hazards, lack of safety training, and low levels of safety climate and safety practices remained significant risk factors for WRI. These results will be important to consider in developing future prevention interventions in this setting
A new approach to texture coding using stochastic vector quantization
A new method for texture coding which combines 2-D linear prediction and stochastic vector quantization is presented in this paper. To encode a texture, a linear predictor is computed first. Next, a codebook following the prediction error model is generated and the prediction error is encoded with VQ, using an algorithm which takes into account the pixels surrounding the block being encoded. In the decoder, the error image is decoded first and then filtered as a whole, using the prediction filter. Hence, correlation between pixels is not lost from one block to another and a good reproduction quality can be achieved.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
A glossary for the social epidemiology of work organization. Part 3: terms from labour markets
This is part 3 of a three-part glossary on the
social epidemiology of work organisation. The
first two parts deal with the social psychology
of work and with organisations. This concluding
part presents concepts related to labour markets.
These concepts are drawn from economics, business
and sociology. They relate both to traditional
interests in these disciplines and to contemporary
ideas on post-industrialisation and globalisation,
particularly the growth of employment in service
industries, the development of a 24-h economy,
increased participation of the female labour force
and the perceived needs of employers in emerging
high-tech economies.These changes are of
particular interest because they are linked to
increasing inequality in earnings and changes in
social relationships in employment. These concepts
have the potential to elucidate the pathways
through which health is affected by conditions of
work as an underlying cause
Psychosocial factors and work related sickness absence among permanent and non-permanent employees
Study objective: To examine the association between psychosocial work factors and work related sickness absence among permanent and non-permanent employees by sex.Design: A cross sectional survey conducted in 2000 of a representative sample of the European Union total active population, aged 15 years and older. The independent variables were psychological job demands and job control as measures of psychosocial work environment, and work related sickness absence as the main outcome. Poisson regression models were used to compute sickness absence days' rate ratios.Setting: 15 countries of the European Union.Participants: A sample of permanent (n=12875) and non-permanent (n=1203) workers from the Third European Survey on Working Conditions.Results: High psychological job demands, low job control, and high strain and passive work were associated with higher work related sickness absence. The risks were more pronounced in non-permanent compared with permanent employees and men compared with women.Conclusions: This work extends previous research on employment contracts and sickness absence, suggesting different effects depending on psychosocial working conditions and sex
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Combined release of platelet-rich plasma and 3D-mesenchymal stem cell encapsulation in alginate hydrogels modified by the presence of silica
We report the modified release of platelet-rich plasma from alginate platelet-rich plasma hydrogels altered by the presence of silica. These PRP–alginate–silica compositions can be used as injectable carriers for viable mesenchymal stem cells
'Globesization': ecological evidence on the relationship between fast food outlets and obesity among 26 advanced economies
The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between the density of fast food restaurants and the prevalence of obesity by gender across affluent nations. Data on Subway’s restaurants per 100,000 people and proportions of men and women aged 15 years or older with a body mass index (BMI) higher or equal than 30 Kg/m2 were obtained for 26 of 34 advanced economies. Countries with the highest density of Subway restaurants such as the US (7.52 per 100,000) and Canada (7.43 per 100,000) tend also to have a higher prevalence of obesity in both men (31.3% and 23.2% respectively) and women (33.2% and 22.9% respectively). On the other hand, countries with a relatively low density of Subway restaurants such as Japan (0.13 per 100,000) and Norway (0.19 per 100,000) had a lower prevalence of obesity in both men (2.9% and 6.4% respectively) and women (3.3% and 5.9% respectively). Unadjusted linear regression models showed a significant correlation between the density of Subway’s outlets and the prevalence of adult obesity (β=.46; p=0.02 in men and β=.48; p=0.013 in women). When the data were weighted by population size, the association became substantially stronger in both men and women (β=.85; p=0.0001 and β=.84; p=0.0001, respectively). Covariate adjustment did not reduce the size of the associations. Our study raises serious concerns about that the diffusion of fast food outlets worldwide and calls for coordinated political actions to address what we term ‘globesization’, the ongoing globalization of the obesity epidemic
A method for the quantitative and reversible trapping of sulfidic gases from headspaces and its application to the study of wine reductive off-odors
Some relevant food systems release tiny amounts of sulfidic gases, whose measurement is difficult because of their inherent instability. The present paper demonstrates that Cu(I) solutions trap quantitatively and stabilize sulfidic gases. Once trapped, the gases remain stable for weeks at 4 °C and at least 8 days at 75 °C. Trapped gases can be quantitatively released with tris(2-carboxyethyl) phosphine (TCEP) and brine dilution and then determined by GC. Trapping solutions, placed in 20-mL opened vials housed in 100 mL hermetically-sealed flasks containing wine in anoxia, have been used to monitor the release of sulfidic gases by wines, revealing that at 50 °C, up to 400 μg/L of H2S and 58 μg/L of MeSH can be released in 68 days, and 3–5 times more at 75 °C in 28 days. The possibility to differentiate between released and accumulated amounts provides key clues to understanding the fate of sulfidic gases in wine and other food systems
Comparison of Conventional Hybrid and CTC/Attention Decoders for Continuous Visual Speech Recognition
Thanks to the rise of deep learning and the availability of large-scale
audio-visual databases, recent advances have been achieved in Visual Speech
Recognition (VSR). Similar to other speech processing tasks, these end-to-end
VSR systems are usually based on encoder-decoder architectures. While encoders
are somewhat general, multiple decoding approaches have been explored, such as
the conventional hybrid model based on Deep Neural Networks combined with
Hidden Markov Models (DNN-HMM) or the Connectionist Temporal Classification
(CTC) paradigm. However, there are languages and tasks in which data is scarce,
and in this situation, there is not a clear comparison between different types
of decoders. Therefore, we focused our study on how the conventional DNN-HMM
decoder and its state-of-the-art CTC/Attention counterpart behave depending on
the amount of data used for their estimation. We also analyzed to what extent
our visual speech features were able to adapt to scenarios for which they were
not explicitly trained, either considering a similar dataset or another
collected for a different language. Results showed that the conventional
paradigm reached recognition rates that improve the CTC/Attention model in
data-scarcity scenarios along with a reduced training time and fewer
parameters.Comment: Accepted at the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational
Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING
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